Divers who plundered Royal Navy wreck jailed

Shipwreck divers who plundered historical artefacts from the wreck of a Royal Navy warship have been jailed.

Nigel Ingram, 57, and John Blight, 58, were found guilty of failing to disclose more than 100 items of wreck, worth more than £150,000, from the HMS Hermes in the English Channel.

The two men were found at the location by French maritime officers on Sept 30 2014. HMS Hermes was sunk by a German submarine in the Dover Strait in October 1914, with the loss of 44 lives. Ingram, from Teynham, Kent, was jailed for four years and Blight from Winchelsea, East Sussex, for three and a half years, at Canterbury Crown Court yesterday.